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Sunday, January 29, 2017

Yesterday afternoon I was watching my kids racing pinewood cars with their Boy Scout troop at the local mosque. It was a quintessential example of cultural assimilation and cultural preservation intertwining to produce something uniquely and entirely American.

Knowing this was playing out against the backdrop of our country adopting immigration measures that certainly feel like a rejection of the cultural intertwining noted above somehow made the whole experience feel more precious. Like trying to hold onto water flowing through your fingers.
Look past all the cleverly-worded dodges offered up by the Trump Administration regarding Friday's draconian Executive Order, and you still end up right back at the baseline fear and hate of Muslims now being the guiding policy of this country. My country. My children's country.

Of course, this is exactly what the President has been building up to for more than a year now. "Islam hates us." "Thousands of Muslims celebrated on 9/11." When it came to his campaign, Islamophobia was a feature, not a bug, yet it wasn't deemed enough of a problem by enough people to deny him office.

When someone shows you who they are, you should believe them. And yet I personally know several people who said some variation of, "He's nuts, but if he steps out of line, Congress will impeach him." (Yes, *this* Congress.) And with that caveat duly noted, they helped this man become the most powerful person on Earth.

To those people: We're now just over a week in, and he's proven to be exactly the same as president that he was while asking to be president. Right now there's an actual Neo-Nazi shaping political and policy decisions for the guy you put into office. Are you still willing to mortgage our country's future on the faint hope of Congress stepping in?

If you've been an unequivocal, unswerving Trump booster from the jump, no matter what, then this clearly isn't aimed at you. There's no changing your mind. But for everyone else: The time to be part of the solution is right now. Make your voices heard. You're not eternally bound to one bad decision, but history will judge our continued silence even after the ramifications of that bad decision are apparent.